Linux, musical road-dogging, and daily life by Paul W. Frields
 
Decidedly not the Evil League of Evil.

Decidedly not the Evil League of Evil.

NOTE: I thought I had posted this last week, but apparently it got filed away as a draft. Mea culpa.

John Poelstra and I introduced an informal release day planning group for Fedora 9. The goal was to act as a sort of cross-project resolution center, making sure that the different groups had what they needed as we push toward release. I’d say it was a fair success because:

  1. No one fell asleep in the calls.
  2. Some people told me it was very useful.
  3. We all agreed that sunrises are so much prettier than sunsets.

The last part there? I made that up. But seriously, the meeting actually did help us do some organizational depsolving, to hijack a bit of jargon. The ultimate goal is to make the release day a headache-free event. My hope is that in doing this again, and starting earlier, we can have an even more positive effect on the Fedora 10 release.

Just to be clear, the purpose of these calls is not to make policies — that’s the province of the lists and other more public and asynchronous venues. Instead, these calls are the equivalent of a high-bandwidth IRC chat. We tried to include a lead from every team we thought could help, including all the usual technical groups as well as artwork, marketing, docs, l10n, and so on:

  • Artwork – Mo Duffy
  • L10n – Dimitris Glezos
  • Docs – Karsten Wade
  • RelEng – Jesse Keating
  • Marketing – Jonathan Roberts
  • Engineering – Tom ‘spot’ Callaway, Jeremy Katz
  • Websites + Infrastructure – Ricky Zhou, Seth Vidal
  • QA – Will Woods

…and myself and John Poelstra. I’m not sure all these people are able to play the same role this time around, so if you’re interested in this group, we’d be happy to hear from you.

I want to use Fedora Talk for these calls, so ostensibly anyone can call in for the conferences. I’m not sure how well the Asterisk server’s current configuration can handle a high number of callers. It may just be a matter of using a lower-bandwidth codec to support a large number of callers; that’s a tradeoff to CPU load, but I expect these codecs (all free as in speech, of course) are extremely low cost overall.

I’ll post more news on this over the next few days as we iron out some additional details.

3 Comments

  1. Stephen Smoogen

    What?!!?! Sunrises are so much worse than sunsets I mean you either have to stay up too late beyond 3 am to see it or get up to early.

    Actually, it might be good to keep the number of people who can talk as a limited number at the beginning of the meetings to keep the Signal to Noise low. [Also keep the recorded meeting smaller in size for posting later as a .ogg]

    People who want to comment on something could get on #fedora-talk-meeting or something and post questions that could be answered during an open section at the end.

    Hope this is useful.

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